Broken Promise to an Army Veteran: Change to GI Bill Proves Costly

After serving 14 months in Iraq, U.S. Army Sgt. Hayleigh Perez planned to use her GI Bill benefits to get a master’s degree and become a physician’s assistant. When she enlisted, the government was paying for any veteran who signed up after Sept. 11 to go to any public university in America.

The sculpture of a soldier takes on a lifelike quality amidst the flow of students at a California college campus. (Orange County Register-ZUMA Press)

When she got out, she got screwed. Twice. A change in the GI bill forced Perez to apply to in-state schools if she wanted free tuition, and then a university in her home state of North Carolina determined that she wasn’t a resident—because she’d spent two years with her active-duty husband Jose in Texas, where he was reassigned in 2009.

Perez is one of the 250,000 post-9/11 soldiers and veterans nationwide that the North Carolina–based nonprofit Student Veterans Advocacy Group estimates have been forced to pay an average of $10,000 each in out-of-state tuition costs as a result of a cost-cutting change to the GI bill last year.

Perez, now 26, enlisted in the Army in 2005 not because she couldn’t get into college or find a job but because she felt like it was her turn, she said. She spent 14 months patching up U.S. soldiers and Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca, then a detention facility in southeast Iraq.

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/28/broken-promise-to-an-army-veteran-change-to-gi-bill-proves-costly.html